As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Smart Home Beginnings

My initial investment into smart home technology began in the middle of 2014 when my fiancee and I moved in together (henceforth, there’ll be a lot more “we” and “us” in this journey than “I” and “me”). I bought a 2nd Generation Nest Thermostat. I had just moved into a new apartment and management didn’t have a problem with my replacing the thermostat, so long as I swapped back to the original unit upon move-out (which turned out to be just a little over 2 years later). The automatic away functionality of the thermostat was nice, and it’s “learning” features worked relatively well for my use case.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read Part 1!

Downsizing & Reboot

In early 2011 my life changed drastically. I moved from one metropolitan area to another and left behind a substantial amount of belongings and technology… including my cat (never fear, she’s back with me today, and is still the sweetest cat you’d ever meet - that’s not hyperbole). I rented a single bedroom from a homeowner. The only networked devices I took with me were the following:

Prologue

My home network and infrastructure (and by extension, my home lab) has had quite an evolution from whenever my first WiFi network was installed. I don’t quite remember the details all the way back that far, but when I first left my father’s home would be when I setup my first WiFi home network. It was a 1-bedroom apartment, and I was entering my final semester of undergraduate college study.

Have you ever had a relatively calm moment a short time before you intend to head to bed and everything just seems… right? Like things are in balance and you could just sit there in contemplative thought before you turn in to bed and get some much-deserved shut-eye? Well, I have. This is a concept I’ve been trying to define to myself for months now, and I think I finally have a good description of what it feels like. Most importantly, I have a portmanteau term that my wife helped come up with to apply to the feeling. The term is equitide.

I’ve been working lately on chronicling my home network’s journey from its nascent beginnings as nothing more than a WiFi router, cable modem, laptops, and smartphones. As I’ve been working on the more recent timeline of all of our smart home network appliances, I stopped to think about how much time and energy I’ve spent in administering them. Cumulatively, it’s a lot. As recently as last week I had to work on our home alarm’s central hub not reconnecting to the network properly after our ISP had some intermittent outages (rebooting the hub did the trick, by the way).

Welcome to my relaunched GitHub Pages site! It’s been awhile since my last post… late 2018, to be exact. Yeah, I sure am active around here, aren’t I? Well, I do intend to change that a bit going forward. Today I’ve relaunched my site with the following changes & enhancements:

• New theme which I believe is more readable
• Broken out projects into their own pages with navigation
  • And removed some projects which didn’t really deserve mention
• Added post backward/forward navigation
• Added sitewide navigation near the header
  • Also social media links in the navigation area
• Imported my Manager README into this site
  • Sorry leadership repository!

I intend to post more frequently than three times over the course of three years, and to post things of substance - my thoughts about management, leadership, technology, and anything else which makes more sense to blog about rather than tweet about.

I’m a part of the Rands Leadership Slack (which I could talk about effusively in another post). As part of my participation in that community, I came across the idea of a manager README. The concept is pretty simple - apply the idea of a software library’s README to a manager. How to deal with me as a manager.

I really liked the idea, so I developed my own a few months ago. I got pretty busy and never ended up posting it online. With a new hire joining my team here in the near future, I wanted to make sure I had it online for my new hire to read. Thus, everybody else gets to read it too! It’s linked on the Projects page, but just for posterity here it is:

Well, I began my GitHub Pages site when I saw a few other people had them. I’ve only really recently been doing anything in the open-source realm, so I figured I should have a landing page for open-source work. Then I got to thinking even more that I really needed a place online other than LinkedIn to express some of my professional and volunteer life. Thus, this GitHub repo and website were born.